The Conversation: Michael Kirby: the rainbow in Asia and the fight for gay rights in our region

In many of the countries represented at the Bangkok conference (Bangladesh, Brunei, Malaysia, Maldives, Pakistan and Singapore) the criminal law continues to punish gays. Getting rid of those laws was proving extremely difficult both because of religious and cultural conservatism.

Throughout much of Asia and the Pacific, the victims of stigma did not have the astonishing spectacle of religious opponents solemnly denying homophobia while urging that we should do hostile things. In much of Asia, Islamic, Christian and other religious leaders outdo each other in exposing frank and honest homophobia. In many places, they whip up hostility and promote deadly violence.  [...]

The HIV Hero award was specially moving because no-one in the audience who had lived through the early burdens of HIV on gay men would not have lost friends, or known of suffering by the combined power of the HIV virus and ongoing community stigma. That award went to Gautam Yadav for his exceptional work in India as an activist, personally living openly with HIV and as role model for young people facing that predicament in India and the region. [...]

In South Korea there are no general criminal laws against gays. However, a special law targets gays in the military. As all young men must undergo military service, this exposes a vulnerable group to special pressure. The new president, Moon Jae-in, told an election rally in April 2017 that he was “opposed to and did not like” homosexuality.

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Haaretz: Netanyahu’s Speedy Absolution for Austria’s neo-Nazis

Establishing ties with Germany remained a sensitive issue for decades. The deal with Adenauer included not only financial reparations (and secret arms deals) but also a speech to the Bundestag in which the chancellor acknowledged Germany’s sins against the Jews. Ben-Gurion also made sure that the Israeli government was not alone in making peace with Germany; his moves were coordinated with World Jewish Congress President Nahum Goldmann, who was a partner to the negotiations with Bonn. The ground rules for atonement were established. For a state or a political entity to absolve itself of its anti-Jewish past, it would have to publicly repudiate its sins and prove itself to be pro-Israel. Jerusalem’s stamp of approval would not be sufficient; it would need the blessing of the Diaspora as well. 

These standards would remain. When, in 1986, 53 percent of Austrian voters chose as their president the former Wehrmacht officer Kurt Waldheim, who had been tainted by his Nazi-era associations with the SS and war crimes committed in the Balkans, Israel downgraded its diplomatic relations with Vienna. The same happened in 2000, when the Freedom Party became part of the ruling coalition.[...]

TIn his meeting with the Visegrad Group (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia) in July, Netanyahu felt comfortable enough among friends to describe the EU’s policy towards Israel as “a joke” and “actually crazy.” He was relying on the leaders of these four countries to help Europe “decide if it wants to live and thrive or if it wants to shrivel and disappear” and the way to do that was “a different policy toward Israel.” To get these nations to stand by Israel in the European forums, Netanyahu has been prepared to overlook the inclusion of racist politicians and Holocaust revisionism of the Polish government and the anti-Semitic tone of the Hungarian government’s campaign against Jewish financier George Soros. Israel’s silence under Netanyahu has been in contradiction to that of major local and international Jewish organizations – just as he has ignored the distress of American Jewish over U.S. President Donald Trump’s embrace of anti-Semitic white supremacists. Now he is looking to the new Kurz-Strache government in Vienna to add Austria to his pro-Israel coalition in the EU.

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Haaretz: Pakistan's New anti-Soros Campaign Boosts Its anti-Semitic, Conspiracy Theory-Infested Political Culture

This is because while analysts see the rise of the anti-Soros phenomenon in the West as a reincarnation of old anti-Semitic tropes about nefarious Jewish financial and social engineering designs, this kind of conspiracist thinking about Jews have never left the Pakistani ethos  - so it's more a question of continual peaking rather than resurfacing. In other words, anti-Semitism is a feature, not a bug, of Pakistani politics. [...]

Last Friday, for instance, in expectation of the Supreme Court verdict on Imran Khan, the chairman of the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI), the main opposition party in the country, the Federal Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb accused Khan of being "funded by Jews and Hindus." [...]

While the prevailing anti-Hindu bigotry is rooted in the legacy of the violent Indo-Pakistani Partition, and Pakistan’s need to justify its creation, the ubiquitous anti-Semitism in the country has Islamist roots. A literalist reading of the Islamic scriptures serves as a justification for espousing violent anti-Jewish sentiments, a characteristic of jihadism. [...]

This has meant that Pakistan, with a registered Jewish population of precisely one person, where both the left and right wings perpetuate anti-Semitism through quasi 'anti-colonialism' and Islamism respectively, remains ripe for political point-scoring through perpetuating anti-Jewish bigotry. 

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Scroll: What proverbs about women’s feet (and bodies) from across the world teach us about gender norms

A small woman usually has small feet; both small women and small feet seem to be considered more attractive. In ancient China, many women’s feet were bound from toe to heel, to make them more seductive. Larger female feet are not only literally regarded as a sexual turn-off but, when referred to in proverbs, they usually stand for something else. Metaphorically women’s small feet indicate “the right measure” in marital relationships. In general, women that look vulnerable seem to have more sex appeal to men than strong-looking females, as female vulnerability confirms the established gender hierarchy. The “right measure” presented in proverbs equates with a relationship on an unequal footing. The Sena who live in Malawi and Mozambique warn against the danger of big female feet, in a proverb with several variants: [...]

And the Hebrew saying “I do not desire a shoe that is larger than my feet” means: I do not desire to marry a wife who is from a higher class than my own. Bigger feet do not only metaphorically refer to her belonging to a higher social class, but also to other matters threatening the status quo. The apparent male aversion to women with bigger feet reflects a deep-seated fear of losing control. Given the fact that women usually have shorter feet than men, proverbs use the image as a convincing metaphor of how things ought to be arranged in gender relationships. That women have an impact in spite of all the messages trying to prevent this from happening, is also expressed in a European proverb: “Without touching with her feet, woman leaves footmarks” (Portuguese and German).

A woman’s feet, and especially her heels, are a standard for her beauty in some cultures, among the Ethiopian Oromo, for example, “A girl’s beauty can be recognised by her heels”, referring to a woman’s perfect heels as an indication of beauty. It is linked to the tradition of veiling the face. In that context, looking at a woman’s naked feet is the only way to find out whether she is old or young. As my Kenyan friend Zera, born in Mombasa on the Islamised Swahili coast, told me: before she was married, her mother wanted her to veil herself, because that was what a virtuous woman ought to do. However, covering herself and wearing the veil did not protect her from men pinching her behind. “But how,” I asked her, “did they know that you were not an old woman? Or did they just take that risk?” Her answer was that men guess your age by your feet, so that they always first look at your feet before deciding whether a pinch is worthwhile.

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YES! Magazine: In Norway, Racism Is Losing. Here’s Why

At first it seems a paradox that expressions of racism can intensify even while substantial progress is being made. On reflection, I realized why: Those on the losing side will fight harder exactly because they see they are losing. [...]

It’s true that some job discrimination and random insults from ethnic Norwegians do continue, but from the point of view of committed racists in Norway, the situation is alarming. Muslim women are pursuing excellence in university studies; Afro-Norwegians are taking influential jobs. One in 5 Norwegians is foreign-born—a higher proportion than in Britain or the U.S.—and more immigrants are arriving. [...]

The forces for and against racism continue to experiment with different tactics as the conflict continues. The largest and most mainstream force doing fear-mongering about immigration is the Progress Party. The party picked up a racist thread that has historically been a part of Norwegian culture and hopes to persuade the citizenry that immigration is “not working.” [...]

The lesson from Scandinavia is that those Black American leaders are right. When Americans of goodwill focus on the level of words and gestures and statues, they severely limit their effectiveness. Racism is much more than culture. If the anti-racist Norwegians and Swedes did not have their economic model of universal services backing them up, they might be losing their struggle now instead of winning it. Free university and vocational education, full employment policies, universal health care and child care, subsidized housing and mass transit, support for new entrepreneurs, and other measures all spell “opportunity” for everyone in capital letters.

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openDemocracy: Why are Polish people so wrong about Muslims in their country?

The recent Ipsos survey Perils of Perception showed that most countries believe their population is much more Muslim than it actually is. But the Poles emerge as the unquestionable leader in these overestimations. Although Muslims make up only around 35,000 of a 38 million population, Poles believe that their number is actually 2.6 million, which would make the Polish Muslim population one of the largest in the European Union after France, Germany and the UK.  

Furthermore, Poles believe that the number of Muslims in the country will grow to up to 13% by 2020. If this were to happen the Muslim population in Poland would have surpassed not only that of Italy, Spain and the Netherlands but even the British which has grown dynamically in the last decade. [...]

Politicians have frequently invoked Islamophobic rhetoric, empowering far-right groups and contributing to a climate where not only Islamophobia, but also anti-Semitism, homophobia, sexism and other expressions of hate seem permissible. This in turn empowered far-right groups that organised several anti-refugee and anti-Muslim demonstrations in 2015 in cities that are home to Muslim minorities such as Białystok. Wrocław, Gdańsk and Kraków. [...]

According to Association Never Again (Nigdy Wiecej) the numbers of homophobic, racist or xenophobic incidents per month drastically shot up from around 20 a month to 20 a week. In recent years we have also observed a particular focus with Muslim women at the centre of both far-right and liberal anti-Muslim agendas.

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Al Jazeera: How Saudi tried to bully Jordan and failed

Unfortunately for Riyadh, most of its actions have failed to achieve their goals, and in almost all cases they have backfired. These include the Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE)-led calamitous war in Yemen, the failed siege of Qatar, the unravelling of Saudi-backed rebels in Syria, and the embarrassing forced detention and "resignation" of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri. [...]

The presumed tripartite Saudi message was this: Amman and Ramallah should lighten up their criticisms of Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital; not join the Organization of Islamic Cooperation emergency summit that convened in Turkey last week; and, support Saudi Arabia's desire to promote an expected Israel-Palestine "peace plan" that is being developed by the White House. [...]

Jordan and Palestine - like Qatar, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon before them - instantly rejected Riyadh's wishes, defied its threats and intimidation, and pursued policies that more closely aligned with the sentiments and interests of their own people. King Abdullah and President Abbas attended the summit in Turkey, strongly denounced the US move on Jerusalem, and for good measure also placed themselves next to Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the ceremonial summit photo.

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Politico: Angela Merkel’s ticking Bavarian time bomb

But the Bavarians have an election for the state assembly coming next fall, which ultimately matters more to them than national politics. For that campaign, CSU leaders are convinced the party has to reassert its die-hard conservative credentials — just as Merkel will be trying to establish and lead a coalition with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) in Berlin, which will inevitably mean tacking to the center.

CSU officials worry such a course at the national level could harm their new champion, Markus Söder, who will take over from Seehofer as Bavarian state premier early next year and lead the campaign to defend the party’s absolute majority in the state assembly. [...]

At the party conference, Söder, who is currently Bavaria’s finance minister, gave a foretaste of his campaign, taking aim at left-leaning newspapers and “champagne drinkers,” and striking a tone that seemed designed to win back voters from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).  “Our world is occidental-Christian, Jewish-humanistic,” he declared.

“Islam has not made an outstanding contribution to Bavaria in the last 200 years and now we have to be clear about the roots of our own land.”

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The Guardian: The Guardian view on Theresa May and Brexit: time to get off her fantasy island

Mrs May probably gets this by now. But a significant minority of her cabinet and her party either doesn’t get it or is recklessly determined not to have it. That is particularly true of the part of the Conservative party that sees Brexit as a deregulatory opportunity, for whom “taking back control” means scrapping as many business costs – taxes, regulations, pension obligations, workplace rights and employment protections – as possible. Reports at the weekend suggested that Michael Gove is leading a cabinet push for the UK to abandon the terms of the EU working time directive – which among other things ensures a maximum 48-hour working week. This is the opposite kind of Britain to the one for which large numbers of working-class leavers voted in 2016. They wanted more security, as they saw it, not less. They did not vote for the freedom to work more hours for less pay and fewer rights. But this deregulated country is the one the Brexiter right is determined to give them. [...]

The third great fantasy is in many respects the most dangerous of them all. This was embodied in last week’s European council decision on phase one. As Mrs May put it on Monday, Britain is committed to uphold the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, to maintain the common travel area with Ireland and, crucially, to avoid a hard border in Ireland. But these goals – all massively desirable – are not compatible with the UK’s departure from the single market and customs union, to which Mrs May remains committed. Any future regulatory divergence between the UK and the EU – between the UK and Ireland – can only create a dangerous situation on the Northern Ireland border with the republic. 

It is hard to know which is worse: that Mrs May knows this and does not mind such an outcome, or that she knows it and is pretending to parliament and the public that it is not a problem. Either way, this is the politics of impossibilism and of circle-squaring. Either way, British politics is crying out for truth not fantasy on Brexit. But Mrs May will not and cannot provide it.

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